VideoAmp brings together unique data characteristics from Set-Top-Box (STB) data commingled with Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) data to create the largest and most robust linear television and OTT dataset powering the advanced television market today

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–VideoAmp, Inc., an interoperable measurement and optimization platform that transforms wasteful mass marketing initiatives into smarter, data-driven strategies, has launched the most comprehensive and accurate commingled dataset in the US, boasting 26M households and 37M devices.

VideoAmp has built a privacy-first platform to solve for current gaps and shortcomings in the brand marketing planning, buying and measurement process. To accomplish this, VideoAmp has partnered with two of the largest Smart TV OEMs and 38 MVPDs for the most accurate viewership data. Following strict privacy protocols, all data is scrubbed, enriched, normalized, anonymized, and commingled into a unified and de-duplicated panel. The panel is then modelled to the US census, to ensure the resulting TV footprint is representative of the entire reachable US without compromising consumer privacy.

Randy Laughlin, SVP of Business Development at VideoAmp said, “We recognized that all individual datasets have flaws — incomplete household viewership, inaccurate program and commercial detection, insufficient scale, and more. As such, it was VideoAmp’s goal to build the industry’s largest and most diverse commingled dataset. The scale gives us the ability to accurately model, project and measure the advanced audiences that advertisers desire. And the diversity of our datasets gives our data science team the ability to correct flaws in each individual data source. Additionally, our variety of partnerships differentiates us in a significant way and we’re looking forward to continued growth and providing new value to our customers in 2020.”

VideoAmp’s commingled TV viewership dataset layers Smart TV ACR, cable and satellite STB data. ACR data provides fast data delivery, a wide geographic reach and supports ad fingerprinting for fast detection. STB data provides complete household viewership, better identity match rates, more accurate program and channel identification. The combination of these two streams is the key to providing advertisers with a more robust dataset to reach audiences more efficiently and accurately. This method both saves on media investments while optimizing reach and frequency at the household level.

“VideoAmp’s commingled TV dataset addresses the weaknesses in both types of event-level TV data – STB & ACR – and is a foundational component of OMG’s Omni TV planning and measurement tools,” said Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer at Omnicom Media Group. “Perhaps more importantly, the modular data processing and warehousing system VideoAmp has created for event-level TV data could provide the foundation for an industry-wide true census dataset to enable the future of audience-based TV planning and measurement for both the buy and sell-sides.”

“Marketers have long desired to gain a unified and holistic view of viewership in order to plan and measure audiences more effectively,” said Maggie Zhang, EVP, Video Research and Insights at Dentsu Aegis Network. “VideoAmp’s commingled TV dataset, which combines multiple linear viewership data sources to achieve greater scale and granularity, is what marketers urgently need to help address the cross-platform measurement challenge. We are excited about the great potential of pairing VideoAmp’s TV dataset with Dentsu’s M1 audience data to help better optimize our clients’ video investment.”

“As we embrace massive transformation across the pharmaceutical industry, Publicis Health Media is constantly exploring new technologies, capabilities, and perspectives that enable us to deliver enhanced value for our clients,” said Andrea Palmer, President at Publicis Health Media. “VideoAmp’s commingled TV dataset combined with our proprietary solutions helps us achieve this by enabling planning and measuring against our audiences and optimizing client investment to patient outcomes.”

Benefits of VideoAmp’s process include the ability to move past age and gender, integrating 1st and 3rd party audience data to provide marketers with more valuable optimization. The commingling methodology also provides clients with a digitally onboarded viewership panel that allows for interoperability between linear, digital and walled gardens for reach and frequency deduplication. All efforts provide an advanced capability in connecting advertising efforts to attribution and business outcomes.

“Most brand advertising is still optimized to deliver against broad-based age and gender so there is a huge opportunity for greater media efficiency,” said Michael Parkes, CRO, VideoAmp. “You can’t optimize to audiences or outcomes you can’t accurately measure. Our commingled TV data gives advertisers the granularity they need to go beyond age and gender with the quality and consistency of currency-grade data so they can trust they are making the right decisions.”

VideoAmp’s cross-screen identity matching is used for household and audience deduplication to remove outliers and add new devices for normalized outreach without data skews. The rigorous process includes using demographic weights to correct for demographic skews, as well as modeling audiences to match the size and composition of the US census. VideoAmp’s proprietary method of skew correction and modeling to census ensures the accuracy of the TV Viewership datasets across areas like age, gender, viewership patterns, income, education, ethnicity and geography.

The commingling process results in more confident network recognition, mitigating the effects of phantom viewing sessions in instances where cable boxes are left on, while the TV is turned off. Increased match rates of 1st and 3rd party attributes between platforms due to increased footprint and span are also a result of the process. Additionally, commingling aids in future proofing, as ACR sources ensure future measurement capabilities of OTT viewership.

“DISH Media pioneered set-top-box-based viewer measurement and has one of the industry’s largest national data footprints,” said Kemal Bokhari, DISH Media General Manager, Data and Analytics. “The inclusion of our rich data in VideoAmp’s new offering creates a more effective Data Driven Linear platform, helping brands reach their audiences with greater precision and efficiency without compromising consumer privacy. At DISH Media, we are excited to see emerging technology like VideoAmp’s, because it ultimately modernizes and advances the TV advertising industry.”

The benefits of the commingled dataset are not exclusive to brands and agencies, but also extend to premium video publishers, creating a truly interoperable ecosystem for the premium video industry. VideoAmp’s offering enables publishers to not only perform cross-screen forecasting more efficiently, but also balance yield and audience optimization, and package inventory with the guarantee that proprietary audience information is secure. Publishers are given the ability to add their own proprietary data to the mix, and therefore leverage the speed of return path data from Smart TV OEMs as well as the scale from STB data providers as a single cohesive dataset in a privacy compliant way.

VideoAmp measures and optimizes billions in advertising spend each year and is backed by The Raine Group, Ankona Capital, Mediaocean, RTL Group and six other leading venture capital groups. For more information, visit videoamp.com or follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.